Agreement with Universities in the Netherlands

Elsevier has established an agreement with the VSNU - Association of Universities in the Netherlands–and UKB – the Dutch Consortium of University Libraries and Royal Library - to help Dutch authors publishing in Elsevier journals make their research open access.

The agreement enables Dutch universities to make 30% of their researchers' publications gold open access by 2018. Dutch researchers can publish gold open access with Elsevier in applicable journals; the universities will pay the Article Processing Charges (APC) on behalf of Dutch authors. An overview of the journal article processing charges (APCs) can be found here.

Although the Dutch government has a stated preference for gold open access, Dutch authors can also continue to self-archive following our sharing policy (green open access).

Gold open access

Authors can choose to publish under an open access "hybrid" option in over 1600 established journals as well as in more than 400 open access journals.

An APC needs to be met for each article published open access. If an author chooses to publish open access in these applicable journals then the APC will be paid for through a central payment scheme set up by the Dutch universities and Elsevier. For authors publishing in these journals there will be no additional cost to publish their research open access. Authors choosing to publish open access in any other journal will need to pay for the APC.

All articles published open access have permitted reuse which is determined by the author's choice of user license. VSNU’s preferred user license is the CC-BY license, which is one of the options that authors can choose for their article.

Green open access

Dutch authors continue to have the option to publish under the subscription business model, and then make their article open access by sharing their accepted manuscript. Further details are available here. To do this:

Authors need to keep a copy of their accepted manuscript, which may include any author-incorporated changes suggested through the peer review process.

Post this version on their institutional repository for immediate institutional access and public access after a journal-specific embargo period has expired.

Accepted manuscripts should in this case be shared under a CC-BY-NC-ND user license.

On the accepted manuscript authors should add a link back to the final version of the article hosted on ScienceDirect.

The author does not need to pay an APC for this option. The cost of publishing is recovered through library subscription payments, and so it is important that the accepted manuscript is shared in ways that enable us to recover our costs.